Businesses and individuals currently use public networks such as the Internet and World Wide Web to distribute large amounts of information or “content” to many users all over the globe. Once this content is distributed over the web, the publisher and/or owner has virtually no control of its redistribution or use. The issue of controlling web content is very important to businesses because most web sites contain at least some content that is considered proprietary. The current lack of control of web content publishing involves a high degree of risk for intellectual property, and may prevent publication altogether. Web users typically compromise the security of web content using any of the methods given below.
1. Copy-and-paste method. The user selects an image or text and chooses ‘Copy’ from the Edit menu (or alternately presses Control-C or any other keys that perform a copy function), and pastes the image or text into an application which allows saving.
2. Print method. The user prints text or images which can then be photocopied or re-digitized via scanning technology.
3. Print-Screen method. The user copies the screen into the common memory or “clipboard” used for inter-application communication and saves it as an image file. If the user simply intends to obtain text, the user then runs the captured image through an optical character recognition (OCR) application to output converted text.
4. View Source method. The user views and/or saves the hyper-text markup language (HTML) source code of the web page, then recreates and saves the original content.
5. Content Transferring. The user copies the file to disk or another machine or network node.
6. Save Method. The user simply chooses the save function and saves the content to the local machine.
Known solutions to the problem of maintaining control of web content generally fall into two categories. The first category relates to systems for marking and tracking image files. Such systems typically implement a “digital watermark”. A digital watermark is typically a small piece of source code that is embedded into an image that enables the owner of the image to track its distribution over the web using specialized software. This tracking solution still provides very little control over how the content is actually distributed and is directed more toward providing some legal recourse once the content is already stolen.
The second category relates to large proprietary secure information distribution systems, which typically do not currently use common web browsers or the web in general. These proprietary systems use specific applications for allowing different levels of user control of certain documents. These specialized systems are usually found inside large corporations, and they tend to be very costly and are generally not accessed by users of the web. Neither solution provides control of web content. Large organizations can use internal intranets, local area networks (LANs) or wide area networks (WANs) for distribution of information that pose the same problems as those described above for public networks such as the Internet.
Therefore, there is a need for an easy and efficient way to provide controlled access to content and to control the distribution of content over a network in a manner that prevents unauthorized duplication.